From the roles she plays to the cigars she smokes, actress Demi Moore makes her own choices.

As Cigar Aficionado magazine approaches 20 years in print, we
are taking a look back at some of the most memorable stories we have
published over the years. In this step back into our vaults, we go to 1996 when we profiled cigar-smoking actress Demi Moore.

It's raining—a Florida rain, warm and
steady. Moisture fills every pore. The clouds are dark and somber, the
palms more gray than green. A mass of army barracks, low, black, ugly;
a platoon of trailers, a stolid pack of long grim trucks. A sprinkling
of bright blue tents, like pushpins on a corkboard chart. Men and
women, in shorts and jeans, shelter under a canopy, gather around a
food cart, load equipment on a truck.

Near the barracks, a congregation of movie lights, shining bright
yellow through opaque windows. In front, a small group, clustered in
blue director's chairs under a protective canvas, talking, glancing
now and then at two Sony monitors, black and white images from inside
the barracks: a cameraman lights a set, a stand-in stands in for the
star.

In a chair, a figure in combat fatigues, standard khaki issue, the
name "O'NEIL" in black stenciled over the left pocket. A soldier, lean
and powerful, black hair mowed to a standard military crewcut, and
then some, a dark stubble outlining a head distinctly ovoid. A left
cheek painted with dirt and blood—more than smudged, a victim of
training more than basic. Behind the chair, a woman; her hands, in
firm round strokes, massage the soldier's neck and back. The soldier
holds a cigar.

"It's a Cuban Montecristo Joyita," the soldier says, taking a long,
pleasurable puff. The voice is assertively strong—and distinctly
feminine. "I prefer the panatelas, though I've tried the Montecristo
No. 2, the torpedo. It's a little big for me but I like it." The name
on the back of the chair: DEMI MOORE.

Demi Moore? The sexy, glamorous, provocative, cigar smoking film star,
the highest-paid actress in movie history, dressed in combat gear, her
alluring jet-black tresses shorn practically to their roots, her face
and figure similarly bereft of the glamour that has adorned movie
screens and magazine covers, gossip columns and celebrity TV shows,
for more than a decade?

Yes, Demi Moore.

The time is mid-June, the scene Camp Blanding, a National Guard base
in the Florida countryside an hour or so south of Jacksonville. It's
the location du jour for Moore's next movie, titled G.I. Jane, in
which she plays a Navy lieutenant, Jordan O'Neil, who opts for
training as the first female Navy SEAL—or Special Forces
frogperson—and undergoes an ordeal at the hands of those in the
military who feel that combat training is not woman's work. Moore is a
co-producer of the film; her director is Ridley Scott, whose credits
include Thelma and Louise, Alien and Blade Runner.

The hair—or lack of it—doesn't faze Moore one bit. It simply "goes
with the territory," she says, "of doing whatever's necessary to make
the role realistic," to make an audience believe she is the character
up there on the big screen. The cigars are also part of the
territory. Moore has been smoking them for seven years, and, she says,
"this has become a big cigar smoking set. There's always a Cuban cigar
in some crew member's mouth, and Ridley always has a Montecristo No. 2
in his hand."

But for Demi Moore, there's much, much more that "goes with the
territory" of being a highly publicized, highly visible and highly
paid celebrity in the world of American cinema.

The films in which she has starred—they include Ghost, St. Elmo's
Fire, A Few Good Men,Indecent Proposal, Disclosure, The Scarlet
Letter, Striptease (for which she was paid $12.5 million, a record
for an actress) and Disney's The Hunchback of Notre Dame (in which
she is the voice of Esmeralda)—have grossed more than a billion
dollars. That's right, billion with a "b." She has earned more than
$21 million in the last two years, making her the only film actress on
the Forbes magazine compendium of the highest-paid performers.

Moore has been sometimes lauded and more often vilified by the
celebrity-hungry mass media, praised for the highly popular movie
Ghost, roundly criticized for baring her breasts in Striptease. She
has been condemned for posing nude and pregnant on the cover of Vanity
Fair and for daring to call President Bill Clinton to try to get
Pentagon support for the Navy SEAL movie. (She managed only to speak
to a presidential aide, and the Pentagon turned her and her producers
down because there are no women SEALs, so the movie is being made
without official assistance.) Her almost nine-year marriage to Bruce
Willis, and the birth of their three daughters, have been frequent if
not constant subjects of speculation and fabrication in the headlines
of perhaps every tabloid on the face of the earth.

And yet, to Moore, it is all part of that "territory." She is, for a
movie star, refreshingly direct: her magnetic green eyes immediately
engage rather than avoid. Later, in her trailer, she will talk of her
career, the press, the publicity—good and bad—her technique as an
actress, her marriage, her children, her own troubled childhood, her
hopes for the future—and her love of cigars. She will unhesitatingly
speak her mind.

Criticism of nudity? "You wouldn't limit a man that way." The
controversy over Striptease? "They're already making a big stink over
the poster, which is nothing more than a pantyhose ad. Yet because
it's me it seems to be a big deal."

Evasion is a word Moore seems never to have learned—usually to her
benefit, but sometimes to her detriment. Her attitude toward life is
to march right ahead, do the best she can and let the chips fall. What
others may think is not her concern. Is she the stereotypical,
traditional girl next door? Of course not. But is she a highly
successful, highly competent, driven and ambitious but ultimately
decent and caring professional woman? Yes.

The renowned British actress Joan Plowright, Moore's co-star in The
Scarlet Letter, once put it this way: "Demi uses what she's got and
puts it in the marketplace. She has an honesty, truthfulness and
straightforwardness that is very, very attractive." With Moore, what
you see—and sometimes you see a great deal—is what you get.

Much of what you get consists of dedication, determination and
devotion. She is into building and maintaining her body beautiful, and
she works out frequently with her personal trainer, himself a
state-of-the-art specimen of what years of weightlifting and
cardiovascular exercise can accomplish. After arriving on the set at
7:45 a.m. and working on the movie constantly until 1, she will use
her lunchtime not to rest in her trailer but to go for a 40-minute
run—in the 90-degree Florida sun—her trainer at her side.

But while she certainly places great value in her trim, well-toned
physique, she seems to have the proper perspective. Talking to a crew
member between takes, she will glance down at her abdomen and
laughingly point to the "loose skin." "Loose skin," she says. "It's
from the baby. But it was worth it."

She also, from most accounts, does not behave on set like a spoiled
diva, a grown-up member of the brat pack. The massager, for instance,
who was busy kneading her shoulders outside the barracks is not for
Moore alone. Moore makes a point, on all her films, of providing free
massages for all crew members. "They work so hard and don't get paid a
lot," she says. "It's a little fringe benefit that means something."
Then there is this unsolicited comment from a female crew member upon
finding out that a visitor was on the base to write a profile of the
star: "She is generous and gracious of spirit. She is never rude, and
she is a pleasure to work for. I've worked with many actresses, and
she is the best. She's special."

Moore is relaxing in her trailer after a long day. She is showered,
fresh; the blood-and-grime makeup has been removed, her glamorous
cheekbones and prominent chin are sparkling clean. She has changed to
jeans and a tight white T-shirt. Bright silver earrings dangle from
her fully exposed, somewhat pointy ears, and the five-o'clock shadow
that is her temporary coiffure seems somewhat neater, more in
place. With or without hair, she exudes unalloyed eroticism—the
healthy kind, natural, totally unforced.

"So," she says, taking a seat and facing her visitor directly, "what
would you like to talk about?"

The current movie seems a natural starting point—and in talking about
Lieut. Jordan O'Neil, Moore will seem more often than not to be
talking about herself.

"This story addresses the issue of whether women should be in combat,"
she says. "We try to see if a woman can meet the standards that a man
would have to measure up to. What attracted me is that the character
is a woman challenging herself beyond what her normal expectations of
herself would be. And because the arena she is challenging herself in
is one of physical strength, I found it was interesting to put myself
in a position where it's inevitable that she will be weaker, and to
see how she can face that fact and overcome that obstacle to
succeed. Stepping into a masculine world but maintaining everything
about the character that's a woman is fascinating. And besides, the
tomboy side of me really needed a place to go."

After all, Moore says, "on the set it's me and a lot of men. So it's
addressing my masculine side, the part of me that has always been able
to be one of the boys. It's the part that's aggressive in the sense of
being assertive. And it's embraced, because I'm with a bunch of men,
and as opposed to being looked on as too domineering, or too pushy,
being called macho or butch, I find they're happy to let me be what I
am. We're all out there acting rough and talking rough and smoking
cigars and cussing up a storm, and there's great joy in the
camaraderie. As a woman, you don't often get a chance to step into a
situation like that. Women have that camaraderie among themselves now
more than they ever have, but men inherently have it. It's socially
ingrained."

The movie and the preparation for it have at times been grueling, she
says, but she loves it. "I'm just having a blast," she says. "On many
days it doesn't feel like work. I did pre-training for the movie where
we went through a modified SEAL training. I showed up at 6 a.m., me
and 40 guys, some extras, some actors, we were all thrown into it, and
they kicked my ass until 4 p.m. and I didn't say boo. I loved it."

The role, she says, is completely different from the stripper she
portrays in Striptease, "who is so inherently feminine."

"I try to find roles that are completely different from what I've done
before," she says. "I'm just trying to keep it interesting, to
challenge myself, and the only way to do that is to stretch. If I
stayed in the same mode it might be safer, but it just wouldn't be as
challenging."

Moore acknowledges that the subject matter of Striptease is more than
slightly controversial. "Yes, I know that some people feel that
stripping is exploitive, that some women's groups have certain
attitudes toward women who choose to do it," she says. "But what I
discovered when I got on the inside of it was an interesting aspect of
strength: not the down sides, which are fairly obvious, but the plus
sides, which are not. Many of the women feel very empowered, not by
taking their clothes off but by the fact that they have the ability to
affect someone's emotions, to change a mood, to alter someone's
experience, just like an actor does, male or female. The women also
have a very good sense of themselves and their sensuality, a comfort
with their bodies. And I also found that some of them feel quite
empowered by the fact that they are doing a little dance and walking
away with between $800 and $3,000 a night."

She also acknowledges that her most recent movies—The Juror, Now and
Then, The Scarlet Letter—have not been as commercially or critically
successful as she and her producers might have hoped, and that this
fact is a potential cause for concern in terms of both the money she
might make on films to come and the opportunities she might be
offered. The Scarlet Letter, in which she starred as Hester Prynne,
was blasted for making Nathaniel Hawthorne's sad ending a happy
Hollywood one, and critics questioned whether a twentieth century
sexpot was the right choice to portray a seventeenth century
adulteress. But Moore is both philosophical and optimistic.

"In the balance of my track record of pluses and minuses, I'm far
into the pluses," Moore says. "No career is 100 percent. In truth, I
have been fairly fortunate. But it's a crapshoot every time you go
out. Sometimes you have a story you think has everything and it just
doesn't work. Sometimes you do something that you think has nothing
particularly commercial going for it and it turns out to be a big
hit. Sometimes a film, like The Juror, actually gets decent reviews
but doesn't do that well, and you can't explain it. You just never
know. But I seem to just keep chugging along and keep moving through
it.

"I don't get too concerned because the variables are so great. And
the effort I put into making a movie is never different. What I am
putting into this is no different from what I put into The Scarlet
Letter. I put every ounce of my heart and soul into it. The best thing
I can get from a movie is the experience of making it. And the rest is
whatever it's going to be. You can't get caught up in the end
result. If I do, then I will stop living in the here and now. So for
me, even though I've got a very big movie, Striptease, coming out in
two weeks, and it's a movie that's had a lot of ink, a lot of focus,
and I know already that it's going to have a lot of controversy, I
also know that it's already far behind me. Because I'm here making
this movie now. It's the process that counts, and I've moved on, and
I'm in the process of doing something else. Striptease seems so long
ago."

The bad press Moore has often received does not bother her, she
says. "I don't give it much power," she says. "I don't allow myself to
say or feel that they're not being fair to me. I feel that the press
is a big machine that runs of its own will, and to fight against it
would take too much of my focus and my energy. All I can really do is
try to find the safest way I can to use the press for positive
things—promoting what I love, the movies I make. The rest of it, even
though sometimes it hurts, sometimes it's disappointing, sometimes
it's unjust, I just don't want to get caught up in it. I've seen what
the press does to other stars, and I know I'm no exception. Everybody
has their day. Sometimes it's a good time for you in the press,
sometimes it's just your turn to get hit. There seems to be no rhyme
or reason, no matter what you're doing or how hard you're
working. Except you do see that sometimes it comes like the tide—if
it's been a really good time for you, the press starts looking for
reasons to bring you down, and if you're really down it seems as if
they start to jump on a bandwagon so they can be the creators and
bring you back. So I just try to ride the wave."

Being a celebrity can be difficult, she says—when she remembers that
she is one. "When I'm not working, I'm a pretty easygoing, simple kind
of person," she says. "I'll be out at a restaurant on the weekend, a
low-key kind of place, and we'll be in the middle of a discussion, and
it's only when somebody comes up and asks me for my autograph that I'm
reminded that that other person, the celebrity, is me, too. And
sometimes I watch that other me while it's happening, and it's
interesting, because I usually don't see myself that way. It's only
when somebody else reflects it that I see it."

She tries, she says, to see "the part of celebrity that's the
sweetness and not the part that's a pain in the ass—where you're in
the middle of a conversation and you're trying to share an evening
with friends, and people are interrupting. They don't mean to. They're
excited. They're wanting to come close to something that they only see
at a great distance. So I try to have compassion for the part that can
be irritating. After all, they're the audience, and without them...."

The only time it's really unpleasant, she says, "is when it invades my
family's private time, the time I spend with Bruce and the children,
and I get taken away from them. If, for instance, we're at Disney
World and people are coming up all the time and making it
uncomfortable."